


Skifter's Luck

by Nemonus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Card Games, F/M, Gen, Jyn Erso has a bad memory, Pre-Relationship, clawing out some space in a very fast-moving canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 17:37:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8904976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: There was a certain way to comfort people who were very suspicious.





	

Bodhi Rook had never been lucky.  
  
Baze played blisteringly good hands, and Cassian, the quintessential spy, had a sabacc face like statues on Jedha. Chirrut had declined to play, intoning that what some called chance was simply one manifestation of the will of the Force of Others. Jyn, Bodhi imagined, had enough gambling for one day and awaited an audience with the Alliance high command with her arms around her knees. She had provided the cards. Bodhi rubbed last week’s winnings against the inside of his sleeve pocket and worried. Cassian had sent K2 to talk to the Intelligence handler, a mission about which Bodhi didn’t have details.  
  
After a few moments of stony consideration, Cassian put a fan of cards down. The hand was nearly a perfect -23, useless before the suspension field flicked on but not a bad set-up for a win. Baze pursed his lips. Bodhi squirmed. In the Imperial depots where he had spent most of his leisure time, they usually had electronic cards that would shuffle at a touch. On humid Yavin 4 it was a dog-eared paper deck.  
  
Baze played a hand that beat Cassian’s. Bodhi tapped his fingers next to the randomizer on the table.  
  
“I used to not do too bad at the odupiendo races,” he muttered.  
  
“What is _that_?” Cassian said, not quite dismissively. “What _is_ that?”  
  
“Is that an animal?” Jyn said. She was on the other side of the table at the side of the hangar, sitting on the decorative edge of a temple crenelation now rubbed round by the military traffic.  
  
“Back on Jedha,” Chirrut said. Baze nodded.  
  
“They were these creatures,” Bodhi said. “These big …” He gestured, but couldn’t find the words. It was just as likely that he’d name some other creature Cassian hadn’t heard of either, anyway. Big reptilian thing, four legs, fast.    
  
Force, he didn’t want to have to say that he couldn’t remember the word. People all ready looked at him with deserved suspicion.  
  
Asking for help was the last thing he wanted to do.  
  
Over the last few days, he had learned the vast difference between wanting to be saved and wanting to ask someone to save him. The journey to see Saw Gerrera had been that way. There had been an image of a rebel leader, physically indistinct but clouded and fuzzy with assumptions: a noble man, an untouched man, a lucky man in a rigged game of a war. Bodhi had hung onto this image when he had asked the Tognath to take him to Gerrera and he had hung on when he faced the scrying eye and syringe mind of the thing in the sandy cell, even though Bodhi had known by then who Gerrera was. Had known that the hero was a man who wheezed and shouted, who did not trust, who would not save him.  
  
Bodhi could focus on Cassian’s expression, though, could lock his gaze onto the spy’s collar. “What planet are you from?” Bodhi asked.  
  
“Fest,” Cassian said without inflection. Either he was not attached to the idea of his homeworld or he had practiced sounding that way. Or he was lying, which everyone knew he was practiced at doing. Most charitably, he suspected that no one would have heard of or care about the planet Fest.  
  
“Play your cards,” Baze rumbled.  
  
“Fest, Fest.” Bodhi snapped his fingers. “There’s a brown dwarf on the outskirts. Makes hyperspace lanes slide toward it just so.” He steepled his fingers, saw Jyn watching him with wide eyes.  
  
“That’s right.” Cassian’s smile was as thin as the approach to his world. A Rebel transport rumbled past the table with four soldiers perched on the outside of the tracked vehicle. Chirrut, the closest to the sound, looked up. Baze put a hand on his partner’s shoulder and shook for a moment, some silent reassurance.  
  
“Where are you from?” Jyn pointed a gloved hand at Bodhi in what might have been the shape of a gun or might have been a blessing of the Force. How stressed she must be, after the death of her father and a Rebel pilot pulling the trigger - she might feel surrounded here, among what were supposed to be her own people.  
  
“I’m Jedhese,” Bodhi said. “Like them.” Baze and Chirrut.  
  
Jyn sat back, looking for a moment up at the ceiling. Maybe she expected it to fall down. If he heard a blast, Bodhi would go for the stairs; these temples had survived for millennia, and might take a modern bombardment even if the starfighters didn’t.  
  
“Play your cards,” Baze said.  
  
“The roll won’t become any more or less random if he waits,” Chirrut said. The blind man’s head was still cocked toward the warning-striped pathway behind him.  
  
“We’ll see if the button even works,” Cassian said. “The power flickers, sometimes, and they aren’t going to prioritize …”  
  
Jyn muttered in Bodhi’s ear. “Use the Sun.”  
  
The Sun: the one face card in Bodhi’s hand. He flinched, not expecting a sound so close or to feel his hair move against his neck. Cassian was finishing his sentence about the Rebel power grid, and the finch could have been attributed to Bodhi’s bad hand, and Jyn was leaning back against the stone like she didn’t think it would crumble.  
  
He set down three cards, including the Sun. Cassian slapped the button.  
  
Cassian’s royal suite flickered and lost their faces. Baze’s flipped to an Idiot and a Queen, leaving him with 24 and Bodhi’s Sun shining alone among the single digits. The Guardian of the Whills laughed, one explosive sound and a shaking in his shoulders. Chirrut smiled a beatific smile.  
  
“Aw.” Bodhi laid his hand down, adopted the same pose of mock surrender that Cassian did. They would accept their defeats with grace. They were playing for a couple of credits, a ration bar, and a patch from an infantry company none of them had ever heard of, found on a table with a sewing kit and a handful of other copies of the same logo. Baze scooped it all up, dropped into into one of the many pouches at his waist.  
  
Cassian stood up first.  
  
“I’ll see you back at the briefing room,” he said, and pushed the rickety chair under the rickety table. Baze and Chirrut headed for the starfighters on their own incomprehensible mission. Bodhi kept sitting, fully expecting to be left fidgeting here until the council members he might be executed for seeing debated whether to let Jyn go look for her father’s war machine. Jyn pushed off the wall and moved fast down the track where the troop mover had gone. Waiting was a valuable part of a pilot’s skill set.  
  
Bodhi looked down at the cards, checking the plays in no particular order. Then: “Jyn. You forgot.”  
  
He muttered it to himself before looking up and starting to chase her down the side of the hangar. “Jyn! You forgot.”  
  
She turned back. “Eh?”  
  
“The cards.”  
  
Recognition caught in her eyes and she turned back. They scooped up the discarded cards together in uncertain silence, leaving the dusty randomizer clamped to the side of the table.  
  
He held out the pile he had gathered. “They are yours, aren’t they?” Maybe he had remembered wrong too. Maybe Bor Gullet had taken that, even though it hadn’t taken the blasted hyperspace routes around Fest, something he hadn’t thought about since the academy.  
  
“Yeah.” She turned away, holding the cards as if about to shuffle the half-deck.  
  
There was a certain way to comfort people who were very suspicious. Bodhi had used it with people who didn’t like their cargo routes switched and he had used it with people who thought he looked suspicious, and some times it had worked and sometimes it hadn’t. It involved explaining himself very clearly, and thinking through what his words might mean to the other person.  
  
The second half was difficult for him right now, kept conjuring up images of people he had known when he was fifteen or of the Alliance high council, but he could manage the first part. “I haven’t reshuffled them. Haven’t swapped in any trick cards or anything. Don’t think I could have managed it under all of those eyes, like you did, but you did it. That was something." He hadn’t expected to say all of that. Was it a clear enough surrender?  
  
Jyn looked at him with a gaze that was level but not suspicious. She had not looked this way at the dying Jedha. She held a hand out for the cards and he slapped the deck lightly against her palm. “Thanks. I appreciate that. Weird being out here after all this. I don’t know if I hope they’ll let me stay.”  
  
There was a lot of pain in that last bit: he had to work up to it.  “Where are you from?” he asked.  
  
“Valltt, originally. Coruscant after, though I didn’t live there long.”  
  
“I thought it might have been, from the accent.”  
  
“Core through and through.” She looked away, half sarcastic and half self-deprecating. He didn’t know how to follow that, didn’t know where to start to work through the mess of memories of Jedha and Eadu and what _she_ must be feeling. It was easier to just be straightforward, to crouch over the table like he was spilling state secrets.  
  
“You cheated for me! I mean you tried, but Baze - look, there’s no luck with me.”  
  
Jyn gave a small smile. “Don’t think any of us have a lot of luck to go around right now.”  
  
“Look, about this briefing today, the thing with the Alliance high command — ”  
  
“Here's how I make my luck.”  
  
Bodhi made himself stop talking, stop fidgeting. The moist, warm air was so different from the dry chill in Bor Gullet’s cavern, but the color of the walls was similar, maybe more gray. If the walls fell down he would head for the stairs.  
  
She flipped through the cards, found the Sun. The paper was thick enough that she could pull apart strands of it at the end. She held the card up so that Bodhi could see a silver surface beneath the threads. “This one blocks the randomizer. It won’t change a match enough that people will notice. A card staying the same is one of the random possibilities, after all. But it sometimes helps to give you a little leeway.”  
  
“Huh.” He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be impressed by her ingenuity or scandalized by her having cheated her own people. “Impressive.”  
  
“I didn’t have any other decks to give them. Can’t even remember to pick up my own father's message ..."  
  
“In all that? For what it’s worth, I don’t have a wonderful memory these days either,” Bodhi said. Would it matter to her that her ally Saw had done that to him? Would it hurt her?  
  
“Yeah. Don’t imagine being cooped up with Bor Gullet would do that to you.”  
  
“I’m sorry about your father. About Saw.”  
  
Jyn flipped through the cards. “Wasn’t you that pulled either trigger. If Alliance says I’ve got to stay here, well, we will see.”  
  
“Yeah. Hopefully …”  
  
“It wasn’t exactly things like Bor Gullet that made me leave him, but it didn’t help.”  
  
“He ever do that to you?” Another troop transport rolled by, an announcement squawked over the loudspeakers, and Bodhi sat down again. “All that … memories and stuff, dug out?”  
  
“He didn’t have to. Saw knew all my bad memories already.” She started walking again, voice low but head high, then pointed at the ceiling. “I think that call was for us.”  
  
“Right, right.” He stood up. “On my way. Thanks for helping me out.”  
  
“When I give that speech in front of the tribunal, you know? I’m glad you’ll be there.”  
  
He had her back now, and Bodhi kept his eyes on the path in case of any more knee-high vehicles. If the bombs dropped, he would try to get back to the Imperial shuttle, maybe. He would reach for Jyn like they all had reached for each other on the way out of Jedha City ( _Force_ , the Empire had killed Jedha City) and he would try to get out.


End file.
